1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vehicle surroundings monitoring system and a vehicle foot illuminating system and, more particularly, to a vehicle surroundings monitoring system that displays the image of an area on the front passenger side of a vehicle and a vehicle foot illuminating system that illuminates the ground outside the vehicle on the front passenger side.
2. Description of the Related Art
A vehicle road surface illuminating system described, for example, in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 7-228191(JP-A-7-228191) is known. The vehicle road surface illuminating system includes a lamp that is provided near a door and that illuminates a road surface; a power supply circuit that supplies electric power to the lamp; a control circuit that receives a lock/unlock signal through remote control to control lock/unlock of the door; and an energizing circuit that receives the unlock signal through the remote control to turn on the power supply circuit for a predetermined period of time and that forcibly turns off the power supply circuit on the basis of an input of at least one of a vehicle running signal indicating that the vehicle is running or a vehicle energization signal indicating that the vehicle is energized. The lamp remains on to illuminate the road surface until the driver gets in the vehicle and, after the driver gets in the vehicle, the lamp is turned off prior to vehicle running.
According to the configuration described in JP-A-7-228191, when the illumination is forcibly terminated by the input of the vehicle running signal or the vehicle energization signal, it does not cause any problem when the occupant is the driver only; however, when another occupant gets into a front passenger seat of the vehicle, there is a possibility that the illumination may not remain on until the occupant gets into the front passenger seat.
Incidentally, a vehicle surroundings monitoring system, called side monitor, is known. The vehicle surroundings monitoring system displays an image by picking up the image of an area on the passenger side of the vehicle with a CCD camera, or the like, to assist the driver in viewing an area on the left side of the vehicle. Thus, the vehicle, surroundings monitoring system helps the driver avoid a scrape or a graze against an obstacle due to a difference in turning radius between the left front wheel and the left rear wheel at a left turn.
If the road surface illuminating system described in JP-A-7-228191 is applied to the vehicle provided with the vehicle surroundings monitoring system, when the lamp is turned on to illuminate a road surface while the image of an area on the vehicle side is being displayed through the camera, a so-called smear phenomenon, that is, a phenomenon that, as a high luminance point is picked up by the camera, the point is trailed up and down, occurs due to the influence of the turned-on illumination in the image of the area on the vehicle side or, because the focal point is set to a light source, the side camera does not operate desirably. Thus, visibility decreases.